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Peter Leyden

Founder of Reinvent

Peter Leyden is the Founder and CEO of Reinvent, a new media startup that gathers top innovators in video conversations about how to fundamentally reinvent our world. He frequently moderates the virtual roundtables as well.

Leyden worked for several innovative organizations that helped reinvent the fields of media, business and politics: He was managing editor at the original Wired magazine that helped introduce the digital revolution in the 1990s. He worked at Global Business Network, the pioneering think tank that helped corporations plan for the future. He was founding director of the New Politics Institute that helped those in Washington transition to politics on the Internet.

Leyden knows much about new technologies and big trends impacting the future and frequently gives keynote talks on these topics through Keppler Speakers. He is the coauthor of two multi-disciplinary books on the future: The Long Boom and What’s Next. Leyden started his career as a journalist, including serving as a special correspondent for Newsweek magazine in Asia. He has spent his entire life interviewing remarkable people about big ideas.

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At the inaugural TEDxOakland event in October, Reinvent Founder Peter Leyden explained how California sets the precedent for what happens in the rest of the nation—only 15 years early. From anti-immigrant backlash to corporate tax cuts, California has experienced many of the challenges and missteps that now face the United States as a whole, and…

America today desperately needs a 21st-century model that enables companies and increasingly independent workers to thrive together in our new high-tech, global economy. A polarized, paralyzed government in Washington D.C. won’t lead the way anytime soon. Is it time for a “Treaty of San Francisco” which replicates the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit?”

In this keynote presentation at the American Planning Association (APA) conference, Peter Leyden makes the case for how the chaos and disruption of the early 21st century will yield a more digital, global, sustainable world.

One way to read the election of Donald Trump is that Americans want the current system – the way our economy, society and government work – to undergo a fundamental transformation. What is the beginning of a political grand strategy that plays off Trump and creates a more transformational way forward that actually solves the challenges of our times?

If Donald Trump’s election can be interpreted as a backlash against progress and the future, Robin Chase is here to say the future is coming much more quickly than many of us think, particularly where autonomous vehicles (AVs) are concerned. Chase, who co-founded Zipcar, believes that AVs will go on the market as early as 2020.

John Della Volpe, Director of Polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and Founder and CEO of SocialSphere, has been studying Millennials since 2000. It all started, said Della Volpe, with two Harvard students who wanted to survey Millennials and find out why they were volunteering but not voting. Della Volpe has been polling and analyzing this generation—which he defines as people born between 1980 and 2000—ever since.

Sunil Paul co-founded Sidecar in 2011 on a novel premise—that technology could allow anyone to become a driver and accept money for that ride. According to Paul, Sidecar, which was purchased by General Motors in early 2016, pioneered the term “ride sharing”.

Sharing economy expert and advisor April Rinne has traveled to almost 100 countries and worked in around 50 of them. “None define sharing the same way,” Rinne says, though she adds that the most general definition of the sharing economy involves sharing under-utilized assets, spaces, and skills.

Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), believes that while regulation isn’t necessarily bad, it shouldn’t be over-intrusive. The Disruptive Innovation Council, a subset of the CTA, does market research and lobbies governments in the hopes of promoting the idea that innovation is great for society.

Arun Sundararajan, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and author of the recent book The Sharing Economy, believes crowd-based capitalism could replace managerial capitalism in the next 10-20 years. Sundararajan believes crowd-based capitalism is an inherently superior model, one that uses resources more efficiently, which tends to result in increased economic productivity.

Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, first explored the potential of the modern sharing economy in a Yale Law Review article in 2004, and is credited as one of the first people to articulate the concept. More than a decade later, Benkler spoke about how our reality measures up to his initial conception.

Every day, the average American uses the same amount of energy that he or she would get from eating 1,000 cheeseburgers. That’s the equivalent of all Americans consuming 320 billion burgers worth of energy every 24 hours.

Stephen Yarwood, the former Lord Mayor of Adelaide, Australia, is a firm believer in our digital future. “I’ve always been convinced that technology was going to not only drive change, but create a new operating system for cities,” said Yarwood.

Francesco Rutelli, former Mayor of Rome and a member of Airbnb’s Mayoral Advisory Board, wants tourists visiting Italy to take full advantage of the wealth of culture that Italy has to offer. Rutelli believes that Airbnb is part of the answer to the question of how to provide tourists with personalized experiences.

Annise Parker, the mayor of Houston, Texas, from 2010 until January 2016, is well-accustomed to navigating the often murky waters of sharing economy regulation. Parker’s first experience with the sharing economy was using Zipcar’s technology to manage Houston’s fleet of light-duty vehicles.

Laura Murphy, the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s DC legislative office, recently conducted a 90-day review of discrimination on Airbnb. Murphy says that she believes it’s in the enlightened self-interest of not only Airbnb, but all sharing economy companies, to make a sustained effort to serve entire communities, not just an elite market share.

Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, believes we should rethink the world using today’s technology. “Let’s stop optimizing for the short-term. Let’s start optimizing for the long-term, and think about how to make the society we want,” O’Reilly says.

Co-Founder of Peers.org Natalie Foster is a strong proponent of creating a new social safety net outside the bounds of traditional employment. Even if we wanted to bring back the unionized jobs that built the American middle class, Foster says, we can’t. “Work is shifting away from protected jobs, and towards service and retail sectors.”

Andrew Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and author of Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, believes a universal basic income is the best way for the United States to deal with massive changes in our economy—changes that will only be exacerbated by increasing automation.

Co-Founder of Couchsurfing Casey Fenton believes that people are fundamentally good and want to help each other. Fenton, who founded Couchsurfing in 2003 as a way to explore the world and meet new people while saving resources, describes Couchsurfing as a “backstage pass to the world.”

Mayor Nutter believes that city officials should first and foremost remain open to the possibility of disruptive companies that can provide new or better services to their constituents. While he admits there is no one-size-fits-all method to regulating and taxing the sharing economy, Mayor Nutter believes that it will continue to evolve and remain in demand, particularly among Americans concentrated in city centers.

Entrepreneur and investor Nick Hanauer, one of the most vocal proponents of raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, wants his fellow one percenters to understand the importance of addressing income inequality. No one has a bigger stake in a thriving middle class than the wealthy, Hanauer said.

Palak Shah is the Social Innovations Director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), the leading voice for the millions of women who work as domestic workers, women who have been excluded from U.S. labor laws for decades. She is optimistic that tech, governments, and social movements can collaborate to make positive changes in the lives of workers.

Kevin Kelly is one of the most original thinkers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he has spent much of his life seeking out other cutting edge innovators in the region. Join us in our second gathering of What’s Now: San Francisco, which will double as a book party for Kevin and those who have come to know him over the years.

Professor and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff, author most recently of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, doesn’t blame the billionaires for income inequality—he blames the operating system. “It’s not about redistributing the spoils of capitalism after the fact,” said Rushkoff, “It’s about pre-distributing the means of production before the fact.”

Founder of Crowd Companies Jeremiah Owyang thinks that the sharing economy—though he prefers the term collaborative economy—could exceed PwC’s projections of $335 billion in revenue by 2025. “There’s really no question whether it’s going to happen or not,” Owyang said of the high rates of adoption of peer-to-peer platforms.

Michelle Miller, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Coworker.org, thinks that in the not-so distant future, work could mean long periods of short-term employment and short periods of having a single job. Coworker.org, which Miller describes as a digital platform for worker voices, facilitates networking and activism among workers at decentralized workplaces, from Starbucks baristas to Uber drivers.

Zipcar Co-Founder Robin Chase believes the status quo is broken, and that sharing economy platforms—which she refers to as “peers inc”—can help rebuild a new status quo. Chase devised the “peers inc” terminology because of the mutual importance of what she sees as two halves of the sharing economy equation: the platform and the peers.

Yerdle Co-Founder Adam Werbach has perhaps the broadest possible definition of the sharing economy. Werbach sees the sharing economy as not Silicon Valley-driven, but rather as an old way of doing things, one that encompasses any joint use of resources, from libraries to roads.

John Battelle is the perfect person to kick off the series What’s Now: San Francisco. John can not only tell the big-picture story of the Bay Area tech boom, but he also has new insights into one of the region’s key drivers of innovation – startups. His most recent startup is launching NewCo Shift, a new media brand covering the rise of NewCos and the biggest shift in business and society since the Industrial Revolution.

The world is by and large a safer, less violent place today than it has been for the past 200 years, yet Americans live in more fear than perhaps ever in the country’s history. How did this happen and what is America afraid of? What should America be afraid of?

The relationship between the United States and China is the most important bilateral relationship in the world today, and it isn’t in great shape. Yet despite the fact that tensions are running high between the U.S. and China, cooperation is budding in the clean energy space. China and the U.S. are collaborating on a variety of bilateral projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in China and strengthen the energy efficiency relationship between the U.S. and China.

Widespread unemployment, especially among young men, creates conditions that are ripe for social unrest, radicalization, and crime. This was the case in Europe and Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, and is the case in the Middle East and elsewhere now. How can the U.S. government and private sector investors accelerate economic development in countries with high unemployment and rising violence?

During the heyday of print reporting, most major U.S. newspapers had a sizable number of foreign bureaus. The advent of Internet news and the subsequent downsizing of newspapers and traditional media organizations have drastically altered how national security and foreign affairs are covered in the United States. Many reporters covering foreign affairs do so from the U.S., meaning that they have less access to sources on the ground, and thus are less able to successfully challenge the official D.C. narrative.

The Zika virus and other global pandemics represent a serious and often underestimated 21st-century security threat. Globalization and the ease of international travel have facilitated the spread of infectious diseases in unprecedented ways, and the U.S. is primed to take the lead in creating a new, global health security infrastructure.

Apple CEO Tim Cook’s open letter explaining why Apple refuses to create software for the FBI has far-reaching implications for the ongoing tug-of-war between privacy and security. Perhaps now even more so than when Edward Snowden’s initial revelations were published, privacy and security are often portrayed as being diametrically opposed.

While drastically low gas prices may not mean anything more than savings at the pump for the average American consumer, shifts in global oil prices and production could bring the Middle East to the precipice of transformation. The flooded oil market – the result of U.S. production of shale oil (which has almost doubled since 2009) and Iran’s recent release from sanctions – indicates that oil’s role in the world is fundamentally shifting.

Much of the American foreign policy establishment views Russia as either an aggressive adversary or a declining power stirring up conflict to compensate for its growing irrelevance. Half of all Americans thought the U.S. was heading into another Cold War with Russia during the height of the conflict between Russian and the Ukraine in March of 2014, according to Gallup polls. Can we prevent a new Cold War and engage Russia in ways that promote global peace and security?

It’s been 70 years since the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ushering in the age of nuclear weapons – and a new arms race. For decades, the United States raced the Soviet Union to build up the triad of nuclear weapons systems: intercontinental ballistic missiles, long-range bombers, and submarines. The aging of the nuclear arsenal may present the best opportunity we’ve had in the last 70 years to phase out nuclear weapons. Are there ways to let go of nuclear weapons without sacrificing American security and peace of mind?

In just over a decade, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Soraya Darabi has already achieved a career trajectory that many business students only dream of. In addition to interning Sony Music and the WashingtonPost.com while studying at Georgetown, Darabi has worked at CondeNet (the digital division of Condé Nast), the New York Times (she brought the paper onto social media), and a cloud computing company that was later purchased by Facebook. Darabi has co-founded and invested in multiple startups, including Foodspotting, a geo-location mobile app, and Zady, an e-commerce platform that aims to provide transparency and authenticity to its customers.

Millennials grew up with the Internet, in an interconnected and globalized world, and tend to have different perspectives on foreign policy than their parents and grandparents. According to research from the Cato Institute, Millennials view the world as less threatening than previous generations. Millennials are also more likely to support cooperation and less likely to support military intervention when it comes to international relations. How will the attitudes and values of the Millennial Generation shape American foreign policy in the coming decades?

If you have an argument against the value of the humanities – any argument at all – rest assured Elñora Tena Webb can refute it. Think humanities funding is a waste of money, tech companies don’t want to hire humanities grads, or economically disadvantaged students care only about getting jobs? Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

The only way to successfully combat global warming and climate change will be through an unprecedented level of global cooperation. Almost any successful scenario will require a new level of leadership from the United States and the developed world. How might that coordination force a rework of America’s foreign policy?

Norberto Grzywacz, Dean of the Graduate Schools of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University, believes that some problems – like blindness, for example – are too large and complex to be solved by a group of people from the same discipline. Grzywacz has a very technical background, but a very deep appreciation for the value of the humanities.

Tim Kobe, founder and CEO of design firm Eight Inc., believes that Steve Jobs succeeded in part because he so effectively integrated the left and right sides of his brain. Can the right brain/left brain integration that helped make Steve Jobs such a trailblazer inform the future of both the tech industry and academia?

Edward Maloney is the executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship, an organization that explores ways digital technology can facilitate learning at higher levels and for ever-greater numbers of students. Working through difficult literary texts, according to Maloney, can not only strengthen resilience and concentration skills, but can also help people to challenge assumptions—important for tackling major global challenges like climate change. According to recent research, reading difficult literary fiction may even help increase empathy.

Drastic improvements in automation and artificial intelligence over the last decade or so, and wary comments from high-profile tech industry tycoons like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, have stirred up anxieties that may soon morph into full-blown panic. Will robots take all the jobs? Veteran New York Times technology writer John Markoff admits to having contributed to rising concerns in recent years, but says he now thinks humans will do just fine.

Serial entrepreneur Brian Sager, currently the Founder and CEO of Omnity, composes symphonies and has been to Burning Man, the annual festival in the Nevada desert, 14 times. Sager sees no difference between his obsession with technology and the sciences on one hand, and his love of humanities on the other. It’s the same brain, Sager says.

After the September 11th attacks, the United States quickly devised a strategy to combat global terrorism that is largely still playing out today. America has built an extensive counter-terrorism apparatus almost as powerful as the former Cold War military complex, and our military continues to pursue terrorist groups in an ever-expanding range of territory. What are alternative ways to combat global terrorism than the post 9/11 strategy of perpetual war?

Executive Director of The Long Now Foundation Alexander Rose is helping build a library – not just any library, but a collection of the 3,000 or so books that would be most vital to restarting civilization after its collapse. The Long Now Foundation, which, in its own words, “hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common”, isn’t necessarily expecting a collapse, Rose explained, but views such a collection as a type of litmus test for which books they believe can – and should – stand the test of time.

One of the long-term threats to American national security is the hollowing out of the middle class and the increasing economic stratification of American society. How can American foreign policy and military spending be reworked to help create a different kind of domestic economy? How can the U.S. promote trade policies that would enhance shared prosperity rather than increasing inequality? Can national defense policies with lower military budgets shift public resources and help rebuild the American middle class? Can we promote the adoption of these economic ideals abroad and help reshape the global economy?

Theoretical neuroscientist Vivienne Ming believes that the definition of what it means to be human is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Ming’s work in AI – which she prefers to think of as augmented intelligence, rather than artificial intelligence – aims to maximize human potential by improving problem-solving skills.

What are America’s core national security interests, and what are the real security threats we face in coming decades? Policing the world is expensive, ineffective, and undercuts America’s ability to deal with our real security needs. Can America become more humble in its foreign policy aspirations? How can we build a more effective foreign policy and move away from a foreign policy based on military interventions and support for tyrannical regimes? How do we mobilize an American public that’s tired of expensive, counterproductive wars but still wants to feel secure?

Throughout history, people have gone to college to get a better job, said John O’Malley, a university professor in the theology department at Georgetown University. Yet the Jesuit tradition, of which he and Georgetown University are a part, has done its best to ensure that the education of the whole person is not neglected in favor of job training.

How can the Iran Nuclear Agreement lead to a significant reduction of conflict in the Middle East? Can it lead to new diplomatic initiatives involving Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UN Security Council’s five permanent members in order to move the situations in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine from impasse to greater stability? Can the U.S. move past the ineffective and counterproductive reliance on the unilateral use of military power, and find common ground with Iran and Saudi Arabia on ISIS and a broader range of security issues?

Bestselling author and technologist Robin Sloan has one foot in the world of literature and another in technology, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Sloan, a former Twitter employee and more recently the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, discussed the intersection of technology and publishing in an interview with Reinvent’s founder and CEO Peter Leyden.

Filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain is pioneering an entirely new kind of filmmaking – cloud filmmaking. Shlain asks a question to the world, people film themselves in all different languages, and then Shlain incorporates these submissions into her films, which become available for free online. This method of filmmaking is 21st-century digitization and globalization at its finest, and so it’s perhaps not surprising that Shlain has no patience for technology panic.

Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired and the CEO of 3D Robotics, believes that the potential applications of drones extend far beyond commercial and recreational use. 3D Robotics manufactures more drones weekly than all U.S. aerospace companies combined, and is playing a pivotal role in revolutionizing the accessibility of this relatively new technology.

UC Berkeley Professor of Economics Brad DeLong isn’t overly concerned about economic disruption generated by the ever-growing tech industry – similar disruption has been ongoing for 225 years at least, DeLong says, though the pace has accelerated.

Most people don’t think that nuclear weapons will be eliminated in their lifetimes. In this final roundtable in the Reinvent Nuclear Security series, we took a hard look at five very different but plausible scenarios about how the world actually could eliminate nuclear weapons in 30 years.

An important priority for many in the nuclear security field is getting Millennials engaged in issues involving nuclear bombs. This roundtable spent a lot of time debating whether games might be the answer to this dilemma.

If you’re in college, grad school or just entering the workforce, the odds are high that you haven’t considered a career in the nuclear security field. Even worse, you probably don’t even know that nuclear weapons still pose a major security threat. Didn’t we solve this problem back with the fall of the Berlin Wall?

The path to nuclear disarmament will likely require the formation of new partnerships with organizations and people outside the traditional nuclear weapons establishment. How do we start thinking about sharing the responsibility of solving this complex problem?

The Manhattan Project during World War II recruited some of the smartest minds in the country to tackle a major challenge to America and the world. Could we fundamentally repurpose the Los Alamos National Lab and the other two national nuclear weapons labs, and use this brainpower to solve other challenges?

Political polarization in the United States is not a Washington D.C. problem, it’s an American people problem. Because it’s a people problem, the ultimate solution lies not solely with the politicians in D.C., but with us as well.

For this roundtable, we brought together representatives from inside the government, including the White House, to talk with entrepreneurs who are developing rapid diagnostic technologies that could be applied to the spread of Ebola.

Bestselling author and leading voice in the food movement Michael Pollan believes we need a national food policy – much like we have a national economic policy – to reorient the goals of food production and realign the resources of federal departments that are currently at cross-purposes.

We’ve experienced six election cycles since Howard Dean’s groundbreaking online campaign in 2004, and every two years, various new developments provide strategic advantage to a candidate that sets a new bar for what then becomes standard practice in the field. What developments in the upcoming 2016 election cycle will push the field forward once again?

The best practices of building technology in the private sector are at odds with how government at all levels requires work to be done. How can we improve the way our government buys and implements technology?

America needs more public investment in research and development of new technologies. Could the federal government invest in more long-term R&D for new technologies if it not only took all the risks but shared in the rewards too?

Talking about economic inequality often instigates discussions of handouts and charity. But flipping this line of thinking to view people struggling in the economy today as the key to a thriving economy tomorrow, changes this.

Roundtable anchor Luis Ubinas, the former president of the Ford Foundation, made the case that immigration reform is in the best interests of Republicans and Democrats. An all-star group of leaders in this field roughed out in real-time the best strategy to quickly carry out that approach out.

The future of business and government will likely require agile forms of development where teams try things out and build for awhile, then test, learn and possibly pivot to a more promising approach. What’s missing here, in the view of roundtable anchor Ari Wallach, is “longpath” thinking.

The critical resource of wireless spectrum that’s available to communicate between all our mobile devices is limited and may result in shortages in the new future. How can we begin to update this system, still trapped in the old broadcast era?

Fifty years after the March on Washington, no one can argue that America has reached the promised land of a society free from racism. People of color today face a very different, and in some ways, more complex, form of systemic racism.

The banking industry may well be headed the way of the publishing, newspaper and music industries—fundamentally shaken by the tech transformation. How do we reinvent sustainable banking by taking advantage of new technological trends?

Impact investing, which tries to find ways to make a positive impact on the planet while realizing returns, was once an experimental niche and is now rapidly entering the mainstream. How do we reinvent finance to better facilitate impact investing and empower a global middle class?

We’re faced with a new form of “affordable housing” crisis in major American cities: The best and brightest of the Millennial Generation who want to dedicate their lives to public benefit causes can’t afford the cost of living in metropolitan areas.

We’re entering the second era of humans in space. David Brin, the scientist and science fiction writer who led this session, refers to it as the “Barnstorming Era.” What ambitious new goals could drive this era of space exploration?

The core infrastructures of our cities was constructed at a time when no one had ever heard of global warming, and general stability of the weather and environment was assumed. Now all regions of America are facing previously unanticipated environmental challenges, ranging from floods to droughts to tornadoes to water shortages.

Technological advances in the private sector are often not realized in public sectors. Our roundtable anchor, Tim O’Reilly, presented ideas about algorithmic regulation that could be applied to regulation in the public sector to improve the effectiveness and responsiveness of traditionally clunky systems.

Higher education is one of the last remaining areas of modern life that remains relatively untouched by digital technologies. Our roundtable participants discussed how new digital technology might be leveraged to expand the scope and quality of higher education.

Government is responsible for essential functions of society like ensuring running water, working sewage, and roads—yet bureaucracy often gets a bad rap. How can we leverage common tech practices to make government bureaucracies work better?

It’s ironic that the one government agency that arguably has the most to do with innovation in America, the Patent Office, is long overdue for an innovative overhaul. How can we apply tech industry best practices to reinvent the patent system?

While digital technologies and the Internet are empowering the individual in ways that could only be dreamed of a generation ago, all that empowerment comes at a high cost in terms of privacy – machines, companies, and governments are able to know a lot more about you that they ever could have known about your parents.

A new political belief system has been gaining influence in the United States, roughly parallel to the rise of the Internet: that of the peer progressive. How could a new mindset towards tech and government help America break out of our old polarizing politics?

The cornucopia of new digital learning tools based on the Internet has never been better, and pioneers in this space are enjoying unprecedented learning experiences. However, the learning experiences of the vast majority of people within most educational institutions remain largely unchanged by new digital technology.